What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830Quotes
The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.
—John Wilkes Booth, 1865The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
—Laozi